“I see you have been fulfilling my mother’s commissions, ma’am,” he said after a three seconds’ pause. “She’s a great novel reader, ain’t she? Maid Dorinda, your most obedient!”
Both women curtsied and smiled.
“Yes, Marquis,” said Rosalba.
Auriol greeted the ladies while Meriel looked on.
“We must not detain you,” said the Marquis, as soon as Maid Dorinda had made a remark about the clemency of the weather. He was feeling ludicrously trapped, bound to both Rosalba and Berinthia, and wanted only to be alone with a man. Auriol, looking at him, guessed a part of this. He glanced at Rosalba, whose face was now shiny and pink under her hat, and absent-mindedly dug with his heels at his horse’s flanks.
Bows were exchanged as soon as Wychwood had quietened his stallion, then the two men rode on. Meriel was convinced that Rosalba’s eyes were fixed on his back, but in fact, they were not. Auriol, riding a few paces behind him, did have his eyes upon him.
The brusque way in which the Marquis had broken up their polite little gathering had disturbed him: Westmarch, though he was a little stiff in company, had never struck him as ill-mannered or unkind before. As they cantered out through the triumphal arch which marked the eastern limit of the town, Auriol realised he did not merely like the Marquis. Unreasonably he almost loved young, innocent, friendly Westmarch, had a stronger feeling for him than he had ever had for any man; and though he did not wish him to make a girl who clearly adored him unhappy, he hoped that nothing would ever come of this clumsy flirtation with Rosalba.
Women could bring nothing but pain to a man of sensibility, he would tell Meriel that. Auriol’s face was as flushed as Rosalba’s had been by the time they reached the post-road, in spite of the sharp sea breeze.
Just before they left the road to make for the rutted track which ran along the cliff-top, Auriol slowed down his horse and looked back over his shoulder at Castle West. Meriel, still ahead, soon noticed the absence of cantering hooves behind him, stopped, and rode back quietly to join his friend.
The castle wall looked beige, not grey, in the butter yellow sunlight; and above it, the sky was hazy with smoke. Built high upon the spur of rock which edged the Westmarch fens, Castle West concealed the town on its southern flank from those who saw it from the north. It seemed to be a primitive fortress still, and only the minor blot of the north-side slum spoilt the impression it gave of ruling both the sea and the empty cornfields.
“All we see is yours,” said Auriol. His voice was thinner than usual, carried away by the wind.
“Nonsense,” said Meriel, though Wychwood’s remark was literally true.
The Longmaster fortunes were solidly based on the forty thousand acres of wheat-growing fields which three hundred years ago Meriel’s ancestor had drained and made fertile before seizing the Marquisate. Once Castle West had been an impregnable citadel, linked to dry land by a single causeway, surrounded not only by its wall and sea but by bird-filled reedy marshes.
All the land they could see belonged to him, but Meriel took Wychwood’s remark to be an amiable mockery, implying that his power was or ought to be limitless, and ought to make him magnificently happy.
“I don’t own the sea,” he said, “as I need scarcely tell you.” He did not want to survey his property now, in front of Wychwood, but Auriol, smiling, backed his horse on to the side of the road and, shading his eyes, looked over the flat land with its dykes and ditches and odd lines of elms and oaks. In the far distance, there was the thin white ribbon of the East Canal.
“No one could call it a picturesque landscape,” said Auriol.
“No, indeed! Hardly to be compared with your country,” said Meriel, slightly offended.
“Every man loves his own country best.”
“Ay, very true, though I have never thought this to be peculiarly my country, having been bred up at Longmaster Wood. I’ve no love for the fens, none at all.” He looked down at his horse’s ears.
“But they make for famous good partridge shooting and plentiful rents,” said Auriol, to cheer him up.
“To own the truth, partridge shooting is not my notion of good sport. I had liefer by far go out after wood-pigeons on my own — without so much as a loader. My father used always to say that if a man can shoot a wood-pigeon, he’s a good shot.”
“He was perfectly right.”
Meriel pulled at his horse’s bridle, smiled and said, “We ought to be on our way, I think sir. Come! There’s a village where I mean to leave the horses — near a vastly pretty little cove I should like you to see.”
As they turned their horses round, their legs brushed roughly together. Neither had realised their animals were so close.
The coast-path, which joined a string of fishing villages, ran more than a mile to the west of the main north road. It was too narrow and too rough for any vehicle but a farm-cart, lined with the long dead grass of last winter, with boulders, bushes and drifts of white sand blown up from the shore. Meriel and Auriol galloped along it. The noise of their riding drowned the screeches of the gulls, and the violent exercise prevented thought and conscious pleasure in being alone.
Some fifteen miles from Castle West, Meriel pointed down the cliff and turned back his head to shout, “There!”
They reined in their horses, and took a branching path. A grubby looking village of white-washed, shale-roofed houses, grouped round a tiny harbour, came into view. Meriel, with his loosened hair blowing all over his face, remembered that he must talk about his marriage to Rosalba. It was ridiculous, he told himself, to imagine that because of her, this would be his last pleasant bachelor excursion with Wychwood.
*
“If she were only disengaged!” said Meriel, and silence fell. Both listened to the slap of the sea on the cliff nearby, and the deep roar of its foaming away.
They were sitting together in the cove on a flat slab of black and weed-patched rock, and their feet were buried in the oozing sand. A light, chill wind was blowing, and the tide was advancing slowly towards them as they looked intently out, over water as calm as an ocean’s ever could be.
“But she is engaged, Westmarch! It’s preposterous, this notion of yours.”
To Auriol, Mr Marling seemed to be the main objection. As the Marquis reflected on this, Auriol said slowly: “You seem not even seriously to have considered that she is in fact betrothed.”
“Juxon seemed not to think that the chief objection, to be sure,” said Meriel, with a small unpleasant smile.
“Juxon? You have discussed this with your secretary?”
The Marquis looked him up and down. “You forget he was once my Governor, sir, and for all his faults he was — often proves himself useful to me. I had thought he might very likely help me contrive the match, might be acquainted with some obliging clerk.”
“Yes, indeed, but …”
“Oh, you are perfectly right, sir, I dislike him!”
“Westmarch,” said Auriol, “I don’t believe you have told me the whole truth about this.” He paused, then spoke with amazing roughness. “You of all men wishing to marry for love, I don’t believe it! Why do you not take your cousin? You know your duty, why consult me, as well as your precious Juxon? And if you consider Maid Rosalba’s betrothal no impediment, the scandal as nothing, your mother’s discomfiture as something desirable, why do you not, not go first to Lady Berinthia —”
“To Berinthia?”
“Confide in her that you have formed a lasting attachment, the world is beginning to look askance at marriages of convenience, after all, and I daresay she is a good enough girl at heart for all her Island-Palace ways! Besides, you would owe so much to her, at least, you’d spare her some degree of mortification, and females seem to like nothing so well as earnest confidences from men, so I’ve heard. Then make your arrangements, marry your Rosalba if you must. Why do you not? What is it? Do you indeed love Maid Rosalba as you say?”
“A thousand reasons. You are very m
uch annoyed, Wychwood, ain’t you? I’m sorry for it.” He hesitated. “Indeed, I have not told you the whole truth yet.”
“Oh. Well — do not, unless you wish to,” said Auriol gently. He touched Meriel’s sleeve for a moment, withdrew his hand, looked away to the far end of the little beach.
The Marquis began to cry, quietly and with set features. “Oh, damn Juxon!”
“Is Juxon — forcing you for some reason of his own to make this atrocious match? Westmarch!” He saw the tears. Meriel swung round. “What?”
“I beg your pardon. But I don’t understand you.” He clenched one fist.
“No one can force me to do anything, anything at all sir, d’you hear?” Meriel thumped the rock, self-consciously.
“No. Though the Marchioness can put intolerable pressure upon you, I collect,” said Auriol. Don’t cry, don’t cry, he wanted to say.
“Pray how can you suppose Juxon is forcing me to marry Rosalba — as though such a thing were in his power — when I have told you precisely the opposite?” said Meriel more calmly. “He was against the match, do you not remember?”
“Westmarch, I don’t know, I ought never to have phrased it in just that way. But I have often wondered — especially now, you say you dislike him, yet you confide in him about an intimate matter — whether he perhaps has some hold over you. Forgive me if I am wrong, but as your friend —”
“Yes,” said Meriel softly, “he has, but then — well, I have some hold over him, sir. Indeed, the same hold.”
“I see,” murmured Auriol.
Meriel turned to him. “No, you do not. Try to guess. Try to guess what it could be!”
“How should I guess?” cried Auriol. “Is it some crime you’ve committed together? A crime of — what is this?”
Quiet.
“I love you and I want you, that is all I truly wished to say to you, ever, but did not dare,” said Meriel. He was breathing hard, his breath smelt of brandy from his hip flask. “To hell with Juxon and the whole rabble. It’s you.” So it’s done now, thought Meriel, how strange. “I do love you.”
Auriol’s mouth trembled. For weeks he had dreaded the possibility that he could be physically drawn towards a member of his own sex. Clearly that was what Meriel meant. Not even after the chance meeting with Maid Rosalba had he put the question crudely to himself: are you, are you, drawn to Meriel Longmaster. He had once wished sincerely that Meriel had a twin sister, but had thought that no doubt she would be as insipid as other women.
“Westmarch,” he whispered.
“Do you love me, in some fashion?” demanded Meriel, “Do you, do you sir?” He scrambled up and stood before him, feet sinking deep into the sand. “Say that you do.”
“Yes, yes I love you, but I am no sodomite, Westmarch. Good God!” For a single moment he had perceived the boy as a ravishing girl.
The Marquis gripped his shoulders and loomed over him, and Auriol felt faint with unnatural desire. “God bless you,” Meriel said, and smiled.
“Yes, I love you, but never in that way, God, no,” Auriol whispered, staring up into the other’s glittering, black-lashed, water-grey eyes. “You are my friend. I am not that way inclined! No, Westmarch, leave go of me!”
“My friend. Yes,” said Meriel very gently, touching Auriol’s cheek. He paused and swallowed and stood up straighter. “Do you know sir, you spoke of sodomites, but you need have no fears on that head.” Auriol listened, and Meriel at last removed his hands and vigorously rubbed them. “You said that Juxon had some hold over me and indeed, it’s true. You see as a man I cannot make a normal marriage, that’s why I thought of little Rosalba — Juxon is the only person in the world who knows, who knows that I am deformed, I am not a man, not a true man. I wish you might have cause to fear sodomy from me, indeed.”
There was another quick silence, unbroken even by a wave’s crash. “What do you mean — you are not a man?” said Auriol.
Now both were white-faced with tears in their eyes, but Meriel looked almost triumphant, like a young man drunk on tales of courage and gallantry imagining his own most glorious death.
“I cannot beget children. I am not properly formed. I — I’m not — in short, I am a woman, sir. So you see, you need have no fear, dammit.”
A whining seagull flew past their heads; out to sea a foghorn sounded.
“I am a woman,” said the Marquis, in a loud clear voice. “I am, it’s perfectly true.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Maid Rosalba Established in Life
“Nonsense! What the devil d’you think you’re saying?”
The Marquis sat down unsteadily on a neighbouring rock. She would not sit with Auriol. She looked exhausted, but arrogant, and strangely young, and as though she were about to laugh.
“It’s true,” she said. “I — was born — with a deformity that caused me to be mistaken for a boy.”
“No. It’s not possible. A man — a person cannot change his sex! When do you —”
“Oh, but I did, Wychwood,” she interrupted. Her voice was very high and light. “I am glad, sir, very glad to have you know. I have been close to madness, so many times, with the horror of it. No, it was right to tell you.”
“Prove this to me, what you say.”
“What, damn it, would you have me show myself naked before you? No, never, oh, no!”
From that moment he began to believe her, though it struck him, commonsensically, that if they were in love, one day she would have to show herself to him if it were true. Imagining the scene, he turned red, returned to reality and said, “But this hardly seems to be more than a dream, how could it be otherwise? I don’t believe you! How can you expect me to believe you?”
“Come here, sir,” said Meriel, making room on her rock. “I will show you enough. Come.”
Slowly he obeyed her, but he did not sit down. “See my face,” she said, looking up at him with pinched lips. “Touch it if you will.”
The skin was as smooth and nearly as flawless as a child’s on the forehead, cheekbones, and nose. But when he touched the lower half, it proved to be rough, and then he noticed pale down on the upper lip. It was such faint down as a woman might well have, but he exclaimed:
“Damn you, you shave!”
“How should I go about, looking like a girl?” She spat the word. “Oh, I try to shave, yes, sometimes. For the sake of appearance.”
“Have you run mad? What is this rigmarole?”
Meriel stood up, unbuttoned her riding coat, grabbed his hand and pressed it against her tunic. She fumbled for the right place, and held it there. “There. Will you still think me a liar? Will you?”
Auriol blinked rapidly. Through the cloth he could feel a little mound, scarcely bigger than half a peach. He said nothing.
“Excellent!” said Meriel, closing her coat.
“Are you a — a hybrid?” whispered Auriol, wiping the hand that had touched her on his sleeve.
“I think not — I wish I were, I might then feel safe — masquerading as a full man. You’re pale as a ghost, sir!” She was blushing, and she knew it.
“Westmarch. My God.”
Meriel started to laugh. “Yes, yes, Westmarch. You tell me you love me, but you can’t love a man, and I tell you I’m a woman, to make you see it is proper to love me, but to be sure in truth you can only love a man, and you look as any other would look, by God — something foul about a female, ain’t there? Oh, it’s rich, sir, it’s hell’s own jest!”
Like a young animal hunting prey for the first time, Meriel watched him: and yet her avid anxious face looked oddly pitiful, as she sat there seeking understanding.
Auriol was not yet able to give understanding. He said as gently as he could, “But how — how could it not have been discovered, till Juxon — till you were twelve years of age, all but a woman! I know that at that time you were ill, and he was attending you, but why not before?”
“Oh yes, it was not six months later that I began to bleed.” Stiffl
y her woman’s face nodded at him, then she grew livelier. “Oh, don’t you see? How should anyone with no more than common knowledge guess, before I reached that certain age? Girl-children and boy-children are not unalike, but that the one has a protrusion and the other not! Mine was but a slight one. The part was there, sir, it seemed only too small,” Meriel insisted. Auriol slowly began to believe her. She went on, with her back turned to the sea.
“My nurse, Araminta, she bathed me till I was six or seven years of age — and I’ll own I remember her looking at it, and my feeling a trifle uncomfortable, as any boy would, and so I asked that I might bathe myself. Then no one at all saw me unclothed, sir. By the luck of the devil I only once suffered an accident that required a physician’s attention, when I was eight, and no very close inspection took place. And after that my father forbade me to swim, so I never was seen naked. He thought I had a weak chest.” Meriel swallowed, and tried to laugh. “How I did resent it at the time, for Philander might swim, you know!” She returned to the real subject of argument.
“But my nurse must have thought only that it was oddly small — how could she, a woman of no education, guess it was no male part, no penis at all, but a female — Juxon did tell me the name — ay, vulva-clitoris, that was it. She must have thought only that it was a remarkably undersized organ — and God knows I have lived in dread of the mere thought that she might, in fact, have begun to guess! I’ve ignored her for years and years for fear she might guess now, remembering, and looking at my face, though she’s all but blind now. As for my mother, my nurse was to me what a mother is to a child of no family, mine as you know never stirs from Castle West, she scarcely saw me when I was at Longmaster Wood.” Meriel drew a deep breath, and tried to conclude, though her conclusion was only a repetition.
“But if my nurse had guessed she would have said so, would she not? She would not have held her tongue. And no one else saw me, and I myself, from the little I knew, thought only that I was undersized! That distressed me enough in all conscience — when I observed when I was ten or so that the thing did not grow with me. Do I put you quite out of countenance, Wychwood, by discoursing on such things?”
The Marquis of Westmarch Page 6